Needless to say there's a lot of cool stuff in this patch which represents a bit step forward in the game development, like the exploration which I've been anticipating a while. Good work.
However:
-Loss of crew experience levels This is sad, because leveling up the crew felt extremely rewarding, and losing your elites (ie when you put them in a fighter wing) added jeopardy and a more human touch to combat. The losses meant something, when they were crew you'd trained up from greens. I hope that more gameplay with officers, including the ability for them to actually die, will supplant the elimination of crew experience levels (which I nonetheless urge you to reconsider carefully).
More mechanics and rules solely for the sake of balance, with little/no intuitive in-world logic Starsector has been developing itself into this corner for a long time and probably the die is cast in this regard, but every once and a while like to point out the limitations of this approach.
For example:
-Hyperspace slows small fleets more than big fleets.
-Random effects of hullmods e.g. Unstable injector reducing weapons range
and old favorites:
-CR/PPT, of course
-Ship has campaign burn speed, and separate combat speed which is different. (so you have ridiculous situations where one ship can have a faster burn speed and keep catching another ship, but the other ship has a faster combat speed and can keep getting away, necessitating a bunch more pre/post combat dialogue box CR rules)
There are two kinds of games (for the purposes of this discussion anyway):
-Simulation games (flight sims, space world sims, mario sims, etc)
-Abstracted games (board games, chess, go-fish, etc)
In abstracted games, you memorize a bunch of arbitrary rules designed to be conducive to smooth gameplay. Bishops move diagonally, rooks move horizontally. Spades are trump cards, whatever.
In a simulation, you memorize the in-world characteristics of different items and entities, like how fast your character can jump. The game sets a few premises (you can run, you can jump, you can shoot a small gun, you can shoot a bigger gun, you get tired) and everything should follow more or less logically from those, if you just are willing to remember the distinction between different entities in the game.
I know I'm simplifying things a bit but there is at least a kernal of truth to the distinction.
Starsector is obviously trying to be a simulation since it has you memorize a bunch of weapon and ship stats, keep track of planets, and so on, but then it is also acting like an abstracted board game- with the mechanics mentioned above that really don't follow logically from the world premises. ("After combat you take a x% CR penalty if you do something or other. Because balance. Bishops move diagonally") They are arbitrary purely for the sake of balance. For an abstracted game this is ok, but for a simulation style game it's sub-optimal, since then players are forced to memorize both abstracted rules and in-world characteristics. It's a big mnemonic burden in addition to breaking the logic and believably of the simulated world. The two approaches aren't very compatible.
The "sustained drive" mechanics would actually not be an example of what I'm talking about, if the fx are done right. When you engage the drive their would be some 'hyperspace drive charging up' sounds for a few moments and the ships engines would start glowing intensely until finally jumping, and this would make immediately clear the in world logic behind the balance dictated rule of having fleets stop for a few moments before the drive starts.
Long story short please try to find balance motivated mechanics that have an in-game logic instead of being arbitrary and non intuitive. Though this would require overhauling the CR system and the combat vs campaign speed disparity issues however.
